UX Design: User-Centered Strategic Plan
UX Design puts your customer's needs at the core of your design.
What is User Experience (UX) Design?
User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. UX design involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability, and function.
Designing an experience includes not only making the software easy to use but also designing the other experiences related to the product, such as the marketing campaign, the packaging, and after-sales support. Most importantly, UX design is concerned with delivering solutions that address pain points and needs.
A UX designer is concerned with the entire process of acquiring and integrating a product, including aspects of branding, design, usability, and function. It’s a story that begins before the device is even in the user’s hands.
Products that provide a great user experience (e.g., the iPhone) are designed with the product’s consumption or use in mind and the entire process of acquiring, owning, and even troubleshooting it. In the same way, UX designers don’t just focus on creating usable products; they focus on other aspects of the user experience, such as pleasure, efficiency, and fun. A good user experience meets a particular user’s needs in the specific context where they use the product.
A UX designer attempts to answer the question: “How can we make the experience of interacting with a computer, a smartphone, a product, or a service as intuitive, smooth, and pleasant as possible?”
UX Designers Consider the Why, What, and How of Product Use
As a UX designer, you should consider the Why, What, and How of product use. The Why involves the users’ motivations for adopting a product, whether they relate to a task they wish to perform with it or to values and views that users associate with the ownership and use of the product. The What addresses the things people can do with a product—its functionality. Finally, the How relates to the design of functionality in an accessible and aesthetically pleasant way.
UX designers start with the Why before determining the What and then, finally, the How to create products that users can form meaningful experiences with. In software designs, you must ensure the product’s “substance” comes through an existing device and offers a seamless, fluid experience.
UX Design is User-Centered
Since UX design encompasses the entire user journey, it’s a multidisciplinary field–UX designers come from various backgrounds such as visual design, programming, psychology, and interaction design. Designing for human users also means working with a heightened scope regarding accessibility and accommodating many potential users’ physical limitations.
A UX designer’s typical tasks vary but often include user research, creating personas, designing wireframes and interactive prototypes, and testing designs. These tasks can vary significantly from one organization to the next. Still, they always demand designers to be the users’ advocates and keep their needs at the center of all design and development efforts. That’s also why most UX designers work in some form of user-centered work process and keep channeling their best-informed efforts until they address all of the relevant issues and user needs optimally.
UX design is the process of creating products (digital or physical) that are practical and usable. Here is a breakdown the ideal characteristics:
- Usable: A product needs to be simple, easy to use, and familiar.
- Useful: A product must fill a need. If the product isn’t filling a perceived gap in the users’ lives, then there is no real reason for them to use it.
- Desirable: The visual aesthetics of the product need to be attractive and evoke positive emotions.
- Findable: If the user has a problem with a product, they should be able to quickly find a solution.
- Accessible: The product or service needs to be accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities.
- Credible: The company and its products need to be trustworthy.
Of course, there’s a lot more to it than just those six characteristics. Here are five things to remember when discussing and defining UX design:
- UX design is more than good usability
The usability of a product’s design helps us understand whether users can complete tasks effectively and efficiently. It’s impossible to have good UX without good usability. However, usability is just one attribute of good UX. Usability helps us create well-functioning products, but the fact that a product is easy to use doesn’t guarantee that people will use it. - UX design is not the same as UI design
UX design is often mistakenly referred to as UI (user interface) design. That’s because many people associate the word “design” with visuals. Even though the user interface is an important part of the user experience, it’s just the surface layer of a product.
UX designers think beyond the surface layer as they design the function behind the visuals, bridging the gap between how something looks and how it works. The following visualization from marketing agency SCORCH shows how UX encompasses many different aspects of product design, including UI design: - UX design is about people
German industrial designer Dieter Rams once said: “You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people.”
Simply put, UX requires a deep understanding of the user: their needs, wants, behaviors, and the context in which they will use a product. The ability to empathize and understand the needs of users is critical for UX designers. - UX design is an ongoing process
The UX design of a product will also evolve as you receive new feedback from users. And as product and industry requirements change, you may need to refresh your design to satisfy new needs. One notable example is the competition between Nokia and Apple in the mobile device marketplace. Nokia was the leader for a long time, but when the first iPhone came out, user expectations about mobile interactions changed. Nokia wasn’t able to satisfy the new needs, and Apple quickly took over the lead. - UX design should account for business needs
It’s no use having a product that people love if it doesn’t also help achieve a business goal. That’s why product creators must consider both the goals of users and the goals of the business. It’s important to find a balance between these two sides to create useful and practical solutions.
Let me give you an example: suppose a user is looking for a home security camera. The user’s goal might be to find and purchase the best device available on the market but within their limited budget. The goal of the business is to—you guessed it—make money and sell the product. To do this, the product team might reduce the number of features to make their camera more budget-friendly, while still keeping in mind the minimum technical requirements.
Your product’s user experience plays a critical role in attracting and retaining your customer base. If users don’t enjoy using your product, it can lead to a poor reputation and revenue loss as your customers turn to your competitors.